This New World
by lilysxx
Summary: Maybe he loved him and maybe he didn't and maybe it didn't matter now, because James was dead and without him Sirius wasn't sure how to stop himself from breaking, wasn't sure how to live in this dark, new world without him. Oneshot Sirius, implied slash, rated T for Angst and dark themes


**Entered for the Popular Song Competition**

**Prompt: _Sugar, We're Going Down: Write about somebody fighting against the pressure to break down_**

* * *

"What have you done, Peter?" Sirius asked, darkly. The small man stood now in the middle of his apartment, trembling. "_Peter!_" Sirius yelled again. Peter started at the noise, wiping his nose inelegantly with the back of his hand and quiveringly meeting Sirius' eye.

"I told him not to," Peter sniffed, "I told him I'm no good at keeping secrets." Sirius was trying his best not to understand. In the back of his head something shivered at the word 'secrets', something which already knew and was trying desperately to make this same thing known to the others, who simply _would not_ believe it.

"Peter," Sirius tried again, struggling to keep his voice even. He had always found him insufferable, even as a boy, and now to have the audacity to be _cryptic... _"What. Did. You. Do?"

But Peter was shaking his head pathetically, wiping his nose again and soaking his sleeve with an unpleasant combination of snot and tears. He gasped for air between sobs. "I-I c-can't tell you," he bawled, "H-he'll kill me..." Sirius' heart dropped to his feet. He knew right then, knew all the worst nightmares he had ever had were realising themselves. Peter _was _no good at keeping secrets.

But Sirius would not accept grief, would not allow the loss it followed. He blocked it off as he felt it begin to seep into his veins, blocked it with a white-hot rage. Throwing himself at the snivelling, pathetic waste of a human life, Sirius grabbed the scruff of his neck and held him up till he stood on his tiptoes, looking Sirius straight in his darkening grey eyes.

"What did you do, you coward?" he hissed, his teeth clenched, his grip tightening around his neck as he felt the anger itself close its claws around his heart and squeeze it until it bled pure ire. Peter was struggling now, finding it difficult to breathe.

"James," he spluttered, "I couldn't... he would have killed me..." Sirius' eyes widened in horror.

"Then you should have _died _for him!" he yelled, "Died for him as he would have died for you! Where is he, you rat?" Peter was shaking his head.

"Too late," he was weeping, "It's done..."

If Sirius had ever really had a world it broke just then, hit like glass by a bullet, cracking first, holding for the slightest of moments, then shattering all around him, cutting him with thousands of tiny wounds as the fragments fell. Here, the time they had broken in to Honeydukes bled out of him, hot and red and sticky. There, the first time they had met on the train to Hogwarts was seeping from where a shard of the debris had caught on his arm.

The anger that was clutching his heart was now grasping so hard he couldn't breathe, its gnarled nails scratching him, drawing even more blood. As well as the grief it was building barricades against the memories out of denial, pumping it through his veins with new fervour.

"No!" he yelled, not really to Peter, but to the Earth, the heavens, to the fates. "No! No! _No!_"

And then with all his fury and will he turned on his heel, leaving the whimpering, blubbering, rat-faced man to realise quite what it was he had done.

Godric's Hollow was dead silent.

Sirius hadn't realised the raging volume of his mind until he landed in the quiet hamlet in the West Country. It was only then that he felt suddenly like he was very loud, like he was disturbing the very air around him. He felt a creeping chill crawl over his shoulders and down his chest as he cast a glance around. No, not a quiet hamlet, a _silent _one.

Death lingered in the air. Sirius knew it by smell, the metallic scent of blood and the must of ashes and that last indeterminate fragrance. If darkness could have a smell, that would be it. The smell of dank walls and cellars and things that crept up on you and were upon you before you even noticed they were there, and then it was too late. This is what death smelled like.

And it was so potent here that Sirius almost felt like gagging.

Half-blinded by rage and denial Sirius stumbled towards the second of his homes, or perhaps his first, as ever since he was a boy home had always been where James was.

The house stood as all houses stand, in tact. From the outside it seemed that everything might be perfectly normal, that inside a husband and his wife were putting their son in bed and kissing each other good night, that perfectly ordinary things happened behind that door, that she cooked and he worked and so the nuclear family continued.

But the door hung open, blown half off its hinges, revealing the true monsters inside.

Sirius paused at the threshold. This was it. Beyond this line, a whole new reality would emerge, a world without James and Lily and their beautiful little son. This new world would be empty, this new world would be grey, this new world would be the nightmarish incarnation of everything Sirius had ever feared.

It was cowardice that forced him into the house, a childish refusal to believe in anything he couldn't see.

At first he was struck by the mess. Spells were still fizzing out against walls, by Sirius' feet as he entered a vase had been knocked over and broken and tulips splayed out on the floor. One wall was dripping with water, another looked like it had been blasted with a steady jet of fire. Sirius recognised all of this immediately for what it was. A battleground. James had gone down fighting.

And there he was. Down.

He lay on the floor between the ripped couch and the overturned coffee table, one hand still clutching his wand, the other over his heart. His eyes- those beautiful hazel eyes Sirius had so often met- were still open and wide and frightened.

Sirius started to run to him, but then found himself turning to the side, falling on his hands and knees and retching. The sight of James so _not alive _had physically repulsed him and his empty stomach kept pushing up bile until his throat was sore and his arms were shaking with the effort it took to hold up the weight of his entire body.

When he was done he rolled over to the side and spent a few minutes staring at the ceiling, trying to digest the information his brain had just received. He decided that James couldn't be dead and this whole night had had the same blood-curdling quality most of his nightmares did. He tried for a few futile moments to force himself awake before realising that he wasn't entirely sure how.

When he stood again, James was still dead.

Slowly, afraid that if he try running again his stomach might decide again to reject what he was seeing, Sirius padded towards James, kneeling beside him.

The silence had finally won over his thoughts, and all the denials and the anger and the protestations had dissipated like mist on a winter's morning, finally revealing the ravages of the cold, cruel hand of the wind. The claw around his heart retreated, leaving behind it the torn and bloodied remains.

The only coherent thought he had was how cold James' hand was as he placed his own over it.

Not quite sure what next to do, Sirius passed a gentle hand over James' face, closing his eyelids. _There, _he thought, _now he could be sleeping. _

_But he's not sleeping, _another voice hissed, somewhere in the darker corners of his mind, _he's dead. _

It took Sirius a while to realise, finally, that this was true. The words hung in his head amongst the silence for a moment, and then the grief hit him like a bludger over the back of his head, forcing him to double over with the pain, knocking the tears right out of him and onto James as he found himself crying into his shirt.

All the memories Sirius had been trying his hardest to forget broke their floodgates and swept him up in their forward surge. Suddenly, Sirius was not only enveloped by the meaningless memories he had been before, but here was James, the real James, the James he had only seen in his darkest of times when he had needed him the most. Here was James at sixteen years old, telling him that he was never going back there, tentatively tending to his scars. Here was twenty one year old James, wrenching a bottle from his lips and telling him that they would face this 'Dark Lord', _together. _

Here was Sirius, eighteen years old, razor to his wrist.

"_Sirius!" James is knocking on the bathroom door frantically. He must have found the note, Sirius thinks. He shouldn't have been back yet. He shouldn't have been back till it was over._

_Sirius is holding the razor in his right hand, trembling. In his head, something is telling him he is pathetic, telling him that he can't even kill himself right. He is a waste, he is pitiful, the world would be better without him, and he doesn't even have the decency to die. _

_He tries to scratch himself again, but the pain is too great and James is still knocking on the door. It sounds like machine gun fire, and this is not how Sirius wants it to happen. He wants to go peacefully. He just wants it to be over._

"_Go away!" he shrieks desperately, "Leave me alone!" But with the confirmation that Sirius is indeed in there James only starts knocking with new fervour. _

"_Let me in, Padfoot! I swear to god, Sirius, let me in!" he sounds just as terrified as Sirius. Sirius is trying to block it out, but somehow James' voice is drowning out the one in his head, the one telling him that he's going to die anyway, that the Dark Lord's going to kill him, or his father is, and that Regulus is practically already dead and that he is next and he might as well do it first._

_The voice gets angrier the more James shouts, because the more Sirius hears James the quieter the voice seems, the easier it is to say no. He's ruining my death, part of Sirius thinks, thank god, thinks the other part. _

_And suddenly the door is gone and James is throwing himself on the floor beside Sirius and grabbing the razor from his hand and tossing it far away. Suddenly he is clutching the blubbering Sirius to his chest and tangling his fingers in his hair and telling him that he is _not _going to die and James will not let him and that he loves him, he loves him so much. _

_And here is the real James, the James who is looking into Sirius' eyes and ordering him to never try anything like that again, the same eyes that are crying the sincerest of tears and promising that he won't, and that he loves James too. And James, the real James, he already knows. _

Sirius emerged from the memory gasping for air, his tears were flowing thicker and faster than they were a few minutes ago and his shoulders were shaking with the effort. He understood now. James was gone, there was nobody left to talk him down.

And suddenly, it wasn't fair.

Suddenly it wasn't fair that everybody was dead. Suddenly it wasn't fair that Regulus and Alphard were gone, that Frank and Alice would never be quite the same, and that everybody Sirius had ever dared to love had been taken away from him.

He didn't even dare approach the way he loved James, because maybe it was as a brother or maybe it was more than that but either way he was dead now and Sirius could have stopped it because he should have just been the secret keeper, because he would have died rather than let anything hurt James. He would rather see James and Lily happy and be dead than this purgatory he was sentenced to. This waiting place. This place where he and James were not both alive nor both dead, this hell where Sirius was without him.

Without the buffer of James the voice returned, recognising an opportunity.

And suddenly it was promising him the best thing he could ever wish for, to be with James again.

And it was telling him that he didn't deserve to live anyway, not after entrusting a git like Peter with a secret so powerful it could and would lead to the destruction of the man he did or didn't love.

And it was about to tell him something else, something that will tighten the noose, when Sirius heard something, something that he might have heard the entire time and mistaken for his own wails or something that had just begun now as if to save him.

Somewhere in the house, and Sirius was sure of this, Harry was crying.

And Sirius knew that if Harry was alive, this new world was not as dark as it once seemed, and that somewhere here James was still alive, and that he would stay alive as long as Harry was alive, and that Sirius could block out the voice that was telling him otherwise. Slowly, Sirius pulled himself up, off of James' form.

When he looked back on the memory of this moment, something certain was omitted, but he remembered caressing James' peaceful face and promising that, if he couldn't save him, he would do anything to protect his son. And then, as Sirius remembered it, he is walking towards the bedroom, and his lips were tingling and cold and he was crying more than he had been before.

Sirius was going down, he has felt himself falling all his life, only now he was falling without the safety of his net, of James. No matter, he thought, if he was going down, he would go down as James did.

Swinging.


End file.
